Hating Microsoft

As most of you know, I use a Mac. I (or my family) have owned an Apple computer since I was three. So, in a certain sense it's never been a choice so much as it's a function of socialization. My dad has always been a big Machead, and I'm marrying another Mac devoteé. Needless to say, Macs will probably be in my home till death do I (de-)part.

Of course, I like Macs. I like their simplicity. I like their elegance. And since Apple moved the platform onto Unix with OS X, they've shown the most amazing stability. Normally I have to remember to reboot my machine every few weeks just to get a clean slate, since it has never crashed on me. Truly beautiful.

The other side of the coin is that I dislike PCs. In fact, I'm growing to loathe them. Invariably, the computers I've had at the various jobs I've worked have been Windows machines. And not in a good way.

Sure, it wasn't bad in my old jobs, where at least I had enough user privileges to be able to download and install applications, meaning I could ditch Internet Explorer in favor of Mozilla. (Honestly, I don't know how Windows users live without tabbed browsing.) The machines still sucked, but a little less.

Now, however, I don't even have that relative luxury. The network in our department is set up so that no one can install anything without admin privileges, a policy that evidently extends to tenured faculty as well. This is justifiable, and probably prudent on the part of the IT administrators, since it means no one's downloading malware and viruses. But by the same token, it makes things a good bit less tolerable for us users.

For instance, all the computers on the network have ZoneAlarm, which I assume serves the purpose of updating virus protection. Probably a good thing, especially with Windows. But it becomes an issue when ZoneAlarm pops up after each log-in notifying us that a new version is now available. Only we can't install it, since we lack admin privileges. And it's utterly futile to select the "Remind me again in X days" option, since it doesn't remember that between log-ins. So every damn time we log in, this stupid little alert pops up. And since our machines all predate the Bush administration, this slows down the machine's performance considerably. I'd like to argue that it's a quality-of-life issue, which it is, but that probably get us anywhere. Especially since the department's dedicated computer support person seems to change every three months.

Or then there's the issue that keeps cropping up on my machine. When I get a Word document via e-mail, it seems incapable of opening it without going through a complicated process of first saving it to the desktop, then opening Word, and finally opening the document from within Word. Even then, it's an iffy proposition. A one-click task takes way more steps than it should. I find this particularly galling since it's not like these are third-party apps. I'm trying to open a Microsoft Word document from Microsoft Internet Explorer on a machine running Microsoft Windows. And it doesn't work. Can you imagine this happening with Apple? Me neither. Apple manages to integrate its software rather seamlessly, and it usually works fairly well with third-party apps. There are various idiosyncracies of the Mac OS, but they're little more than minor nuisances. Not something as fundamental as an issue with Word. (Incidentally, I don't have any of these issues using Word on my Mac.)

But hey, I'm sure Microsoft is hard at work on this issue, which is probably why its much-ballyhooed new OS is several years overdue.